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Monday, February 3, 2014

Q. What do you understand by the providence of God?
A. Providence is the almighty and ever present power of God by which
he upholds, as with his hand, heaven and earth and all creatures, and so
rules them that lead and blade, rain and drought, fruitful and lean
years, food and drink, health and sickness, prosperity and poverty—all
things, in fact, come to us not by chance but from his fatherly hand
(Heidelberg Catechism Q/A 27).

*******

This is my favorite Lord’s Day in the entire Catechism. I absolutely
love its poetic description of providence. ”Sovereignty” is the word
we hear more often. That’s a good word too. But if people run out of
the room crying whenever you talk to them about sovereignty, try using
the word “providence.” For some people God’s sovereignty sounds like
nothing but raw, capricious power: “God has absolute power over all
things and you better get used to it.” That kind of thing. And that
definition is true in a sense, but divine sovereignty, we must never
forget, is sovereignty-for-us. As Eric Liddel’s dad remarked in
Chariots of Fire, God may be a dictator, but “Aye, he is a benign,
loving dictator.”

Coming to grips with God’s all-encompassing providence requires a
massive shift in how we look at the world. It requires changing our
vantage point—from seeing the cosmos as a place where man rules and God
responds, to beholding a universe where God creates and constantly
controls with sovereign love and providential power.

If Jesus had been asked, “How should we treat our neighbors?” and had
responded with this story, perhaps “Be like the Good Samaritan” would
be an acceptable interpretation. Instead, Jesus was asked, “What must I
do to inherit eternal life?” He was asked a vertical question (a
question about a person’s relationship to God) rather than a horizontal
one. The lawyer was, after all, seeking to “justify” himself. This
parable must, therefore, be interpreted vertically. It’s about
justification, not sanctification.

The context puts Jesus’ final exhortation to “go and do likewise” in
perspective. Remember, this is the same Jesus who told his audience at
the Sermon on the Mount that they “must be perfect, as [their] Father in
Heaven is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).
What Jesus is saying in the parable of The Good Samaritan is that, to
inherit eternal life, you must keep God’s law perfectly—which includes
loving your neighbor as yourself. No wiggle room. You must always love
perfectly, sacrificially, selflessly—not just on the outside, but on the
inside too. You must, in other words, always want to love perfectly,
sacrificially, and selflessly. You must never hurt anyone—physically,
emotionally, relationally. And you must always help everyone—physically,
emotionally, relationally. You must never harbor grudges. Never. You
must never seek retribution. Ever. You must never want to seek
retribution. When someone cheats you, instead of trying to get your
stuff or money back, you have to give them more. You have to turn the
other cheek to your most aggressive enemies. You must love perfectly.

“Go and do likewise” is, therefore, not a word of invitation to be
nice. It’s a word of condemnation in answer to the laywer’s question,
“What must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Far from telling the story to help us become like The Good Samaritan,
Jesus tells this story to show us how far from being like The Good
Samaritan we actually are! Jesus’ parable destroys our efforts to
justify ourselves; to find a class of people we can call “neighbors”
that we actually do love. In destroying our self-salvation projects, the
story of The Good Samaritan destroys us. Jesus brings the hammer of the
Law (“Be perfect…”) down on our self-justifying work.

In a rich irony, we move from being identified with the priest and
the Levite who never perfectly love our best friends “as ourselves,”
much less our enemies, to being identified with the traveler in
desperate need of salvation. Jesus intends the parable itself to leave
us beaten and bloodied, lying in a ditch, like the man in the story. We
are the breathless bruised. We are the needy, unable to do anything to
help ourselves. We are the broken people, beaten up by life, robbed of
hope.

1. The term "Holocaust,"
originally from the Greek word "holokauston" which means "sacrifice by
fire," refers to the Nazi's persecution and planned slaughter of the
Jewish people. The biblical word Shoah, meaning "calamity", became the
standard Hebrew term for the Holocaust as early as the 1940s, especially
in Europe and Israel. The term "holocaust" became a household word in
America when in 1978 NBC television aired the miniseries titled Holocaust.

2. The Holocaust began in January 1933 when Hitler came to power and
technically ended on May 8, 1945 (VE Day). But the official genocidal
plan was developed at the Wannsee Conference
on January 20, 1942. Fifteen Nazi leaders, which included a number of
state secretaries, senior officials, party leaders, SS officers, and
other leaders of government departments, held the meeting to discuss
plans for a "final solution to the Jewish question in Europe." (The
Nazis used the euphemistic phrases "Final Solution to the Jewish
Question" and "Final Solution" to refer to the genocide of the Jews.) In
the course of the meeting, Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich outlined how
European Jews would be rounded up and sent to extermination camps.

3. The Nazis distinguished between extermination camps and concentration camps. The interchangeable terms extermination camp (Vernichtungslager) and death camp (Todeslager)
refer to camps whose primary function was genocide. Unlike
concentration camps, the Nazis did not expect the majority of prisoners
taken to the extermination camps to survive more than a few hours after
arrival. In the early years of the Holocaust, the Jews were primarily
sent to concentration camps (where they would often die of torture and
starvation), but from 1942 onwards they were mostly deported to the
extermination camps.

Just a guess, but this will probably be the last time President Obama will let Bill O'Reilly interview him.

About Me

I am the pastor at the East Frankfort Baptist Church in Frankfort, Kentucky. Prior to serving at EFBC, I served as pastor for six years at Goshen Baptist Church in Falls of Rough, KY and associate/youth pastor at Greenup Fork Baptist Church in Owenton, KY for 5 years. I am a graduate of Boyce College and
the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary where I received my Advanced
Masters of Divinity in Biblical and Theological Studies and in 2010 graduated a T.h. M. in systematic theology in 2011.

I am the author of three books, "Logizomai: A Reasonable Faith in an Unreasonable World," "The Death of Death: Engaging the Culture of Death with the Gospel of Christ," and "Knox's Colleague: The Life and Catechisms of John Craig."

I have
been married since July 2006 and have two children; a son named Elijah and a daughter named Evangeline.